Wikipedia developing speech engine for users

Wikipedia in association with researchers in Sweden is working on a crowdsourced speech engine in order to make Wikipedia more accessible to the visually impaired users.TOI Tech | March 14, 2016, 08:43 IST

NEW DELHI: Wikipedia in association with researchers in Sweden is working on a crowdsourced speech engine in order to make Wikipedia more accessible to the visually impaired users.

Wikimedia Sweden has partnered with the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. They are developing a ‘speech synthesis platform’ which will be refined for Wikipedia and it will read the online encyclopaedia for its users. It is an open source search engine and is free for use on sites running the MediaWiki software.

The researchers are developing the engine for Swedish, English and Arabic languages, which will be completed by September 2017 and later it will be expanded to other 280 languages.

The new search engine will be able to communicate the content on Wikipedia for those, who are not able to read the text. The researchers will rely on user contribution for the platform’s development.

In January Wikipedia revealed that it is getting another source of cash for its 15th birthday, expanding beyond fundraising drives that have already poured $250 million into the Internet's leading encyclopaedia. The additional money will come from a new endowment created for Wikipedia, whose website started on January 15, 2001, and is now overseen by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation in San Francisco.

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